On 6 Jun 2017, at 2:17pm, PICCORO McKAY Lenz <[email protected]> wrote:
> how its the status of this work?
The work of parsing comments in the CREATE TABLE command ? I don’t think
anyone else thinks this is worth working on. Discussion in this list has come
up with many reasons why it’s a poor way to store comments, including
* Difficulty of parsing text which may have CR, LT, tab, comma, etc..
* Impossible to update the comments without DROPping and reCREATEing the table
because SQLite implements only a few ALTER TABLE commands.
* Documentation restricted to one language.
Here’s a simple version of the best system I ever came up with from working in
multi-programmer projects, where clear comments were important to letting one
developer know what another intended. Comments for a database can be stored in
the following table in that database:
CREATE TABLE meta_comments (
entityType TEXT COLLATE NOCASE NOT NULL,
theTable TEXT COLLATE NOCASE NOT NULL,
theName TEXT COLLATE NOCASE NOT NULL,
theComment TEXT COLLATE NOCASE NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (entityType, theTable, theName));
Values for "entityType" can be ’schema’,'table','index','trigger','view', and
anything else you want to document.
If you need multilanguage documentation (required for some countries which work
to protect a language) add a "language TEXT COLLATE NOCASE NOT NULL" field and
include it in the primary key. Ih one use of an early version of this we also
used a field called "theVersion" to document changes in each entity, though I
don’t know how sensible that is for most uses. We also used to use a table
like this to store commands, though if I was designing that system from scratch
now I’d use a different table.
I came up with the above structure myself, warrant that it is not encumbered by
any intellectual property, and dedicate it to the public domain. Anyone can
use it for anything they want.
Simon.
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